A British clothing startup, Neuba, has found itself sandwiched between a fashionable Japanese customer base on one side and traditional Indian weavers on the other. Neuba makes casual shirts and t-shirts using a team of eight weavers based in the Indian city of Hyderabad. The highly analogue nature of the production process has been a hit among a niche Japanese …
How fitness got hijacked by fashion and lifestyle
Style and social media have become as integral as sweat to startup fitness brands. Blame LA. The health-conscious Californian city has been luring the fashion world to its sunny streets; perhaps as significant a factor as any behind the coming together of fashion, food and fitness. What used to be called ‘exercise’ has, for many, morphed into something far broader and …
Picking the right collaborators
Menswear brand Agi & Sam took off in 2012 when they collaborated with Liberty and Topman. This stimulated growth but also had significant financial and operational repercussions. Its founders give their advice on what to think about when picking company partners. When recent graduates Agape Mdumulla and Sam Cotton met while working at Alexander McQueen in 2008, it was difficult to fathom how they …
Unmade: knitting fashion and technology together
After being told it couldn’t be done, the creators of Unmade found the technology possible to launch their unique clothes brand, which allows customers to design their own knitwear online. 23 Aug 2016 What happens when a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a fashion designer get together? The academic disciplines of Unmade’s three founders lie at the heart of …
Brexit: Startups’ EU expansion set to slow down
As doing business in Europe inevitably becomes less simple, speedy and cost-efficient, will startups begin to look elsewhere for suppliers, staff and offices abroad? The big difference between doing business in Europe compared to other countries was its simplicity. New taxes, tariffs, directives and even quotas on British companies trading with European ones will be thrashed out by Theresa May and her team in …
Brexit: Startups and the sterling sting
The weak pound is bad news for startups importing goods from Europe – but does the currency crash have positive outcomes too? The dive in sterling from $1.47 on June 23 to $1.29 two weeks later has had a severe impact on British businesses reliant on buying foreign products. It reached its lowest level against the dollar in three decades following …
Building your own factory – from abroad
Two friends starting their own fashion label made the radical decision to open their own workshop in Vietnam. It came after they couldn’t find a supplier who could reproduce designs to the quality they wanted. 20 April 2014 It’s 2am and Ha Dang and Anh Trieu have just got back to Dang’s at from The Spurstowe Arms in east London. Dang reaches …